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Three wines for Vietnamese salad

*** Note to readers: Ann Vogel’s weekly recipe columns are
now going to be run twice a month because of the redesign of the
Kitsap Sun Life section, which runs in Sunday’s paper. We’ll
continue to recommend pairings for her recipes on the Friday before
the Sunday publication, and will also try to write recipes and
pairings of our own on the weeks when Ann’s columns don’t run.
***

Thai Vietnamese salads could get the highest score
for the most ingredients in a dish. And that covers just the dish,
not its sauce.

A Thai dish like Ann Vogel’s “out of this
world salad” combines a wide variety of taste sensations.
There is salty, sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, herbal and earthy and
all these flavors are interacting with each other. On top of all
that, we’re tasked with adding another component: a wine to go with
it.

So we’re going to cover all our bases and recommend three
wines.

The first is a Torrontés. This Argentine grape produces a wine
with beautiful aromatics and lovely citrus tones. Argentina’s Don
Rodolfo Torrontés 2011 is $10 and has a very floral nose with lots
of citrus, great balance and a fresh finish.

Our second recommendation is a riesling which is always a
perfect partner with most Asian cuisines. It has a sweetness level
to match the sweet-and-sour sauce. For this, look for Latah Creek
Winery’s 2011 riesling that sells for $8.

And then there is that unpronounceable, Gewürztraminer. It has
the aromatics, the sweetness and the complexity to work with a
complex dish.

He describes the wine as “lush” with floral characters but even
with all that the wine “still maintains the grape’s natural crisp
character.” Berthau recommends his wine with Thai food or “any
cuisine with a little ‘bite’ to it.”